Microsoft AI is getting a new outpost in London, led by former Inflection and Deepmind scientist Jordan Hoffman

Microsoft has announced a new center in London for its recently unveiled consumer AI division. You will be in front of him Jordan Hoffmanan AI scientist and engineer recently selected by Microsoft from a high-profile AI startup Artificial intelligence turnIn which Microsoft invested last year.

The news comes about three weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella unveiled a new consumer AI division headed by Inflection AI founders, including Mustafa Suleiman — co-founder of Deepmind, the AI ​​company acquired by Google in 2014.

At the time, Nadella said that “several members of the Inflection team” had also joined Microsoft’s new AI unit (Bloomberg Most reported Join already). We now know that one of those was Hoffman, a former PhD student who joined Deepmind as a research scientist in 2020 before jumping to Inflection AI, after Suleiman founded the startup in 2022 and I started hunting staff from Deepmind and Meta.

in Today’s blog postSolomon describes Hoffman as an “exceptional AI scientist and engineer,” and with Solomon himself reporting directly to Nadella in the US, Hoffman will take charge of the new London unit.

Solomon noted that they will launch new job advertisements in the “coming weeks and months” to find new AI talent to join Hoffman in Microsoft’s Paddington office, where they will develop new language models and associated infrastructure and tools.

This also fuels another conversation Announcement issued simultaneously With the UK government, Microsoft said it would invest £2.5 billion ($3.15 billion) in the UK over the next three years, which will include scaling up its data center and training “more than a million people for the AI ​​economy.”

The United Kingdom is considered among Tier 1 countries in the world In terms of investment in AI R&D, behind the US and China, and with Google’s DeepMind also based in the UK capital, we may be about to see a tug of war between two front-runners in the race for AI dominance.

In a related context, Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, recently received a knighthood for “services to artificial intelligence.”

TechCrunch has reached out to Microsoft for comment on the size of its AI center in the UK, but the company said it is not revealing any further details at this time.